The Machine Won’t Kill Creativity. Cowardice Will

Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity feels like both yesterday and a lifetime ago – such is the pace of our industry. The buzz of the festival may have faded but one conversation hasn’t. If anything, its deepened. What started on stages and spilled into late-night dinners – about AI and creativity – has only grown louder. There’s urgency in the air, and still, not enough clarity.

I spoke about it more than once during the Festival. And like many of you, I've increasingly been thinking less about technology itself and more about our response to it. The anxiety. The excitement. The tension. It’s all valid. But it’s also noisy. So, I’m offering this – not as another prediction or hot take, but as a point of view. A pause. A recalibration if you will.

AI is not a threat to creativity. But it is a mirror. It will reflect exactly what we feed it. And if what we put in is bland, derivative, and safe - what comes out will be even more so.

This is not about a tug of war between man and machine. It’s about meaning versus replication. We can automate process. We cannot automate vision. We cannot automate truth.

The work that stood out at Cannes this year – the kind that moved juries, and the broader industry alike wasn’t clever for the sake of it. It was work that felt grounded in something human and specific. “The Final Copy of Ilon Specht” from McCann for L’Oreal Paris was one such piece. A love letter to the legacy of copywriter Ilon Specht, but also a reflection on identity, belief and the timeless truth that beauty can be a point of view as much as it can be a point of difference. That work didn’t just move people, it moved culture. And yes, it moved the market. It reminded us of what our industry is capable of when we lead with conviction, not convenience.

AXA’s “Three Words” was another. Three words “and domestic violence” were added to home insurance policies in France, allowing survivors of domestic abuse to break leases without penalty and access immediate protection. It was a legal change, a brand act, and a cultural stance. No tagline. No cinematic film. Just a quiet, radical shift in what a brand chooses to care about – and how policy itself can become platform.

It didn’t just win the Titanium Grand Prix. It redefined the category and reminded us that truth isn’t always told in a headline. It’s embedded in action.

There were others. Work like the painstaking detail of the ‘Renault – Cars to Work’ campaign tackling real economic access this year was not an AI invention. It was a human intervention.

Smart, strategic and deeply felt. And grounded in Truth Well Told.

At McCann we believe that when a truth is well told, it does more than communicate. It moves people and moves markets. That isn’t a philosophy – it’s a responsibility. Especially now.

Because the risk with AI is not creative annihilation. It’s creative erosion. The slow dilution of taste. The flattening of expression into trend-driven sameness. When everything is optimised, tested, templated – what’s left to remember?

I am not here to romanticise inefficiency. I understand the pressure to deliver faster, leaner, more. But we need to ask: More of what? If AI becomes just another shortcut to content, we lose the friction that forces originality. We lose the texture that makes something stick. Not every idea needs to be perfect. But it needs to be true.

We need fewer outputs and more outcomes. Fewer prompts and more points of view.

So, no – I’m not afraid of AI. I’m far more concerned with apathy. With the gradual erosion of taste and imagination under the guise of progress and optimisation. With brands that stop asking hard questions. With work that doesn’t risk being felt.

The brands that endure will be the ones still brave enough to say something real - and say it beautifully.

At the edge of AI, only the truly creative will endure. Not because we outsmart the machine. But because we out-feel it.

Harjot Singh is the global chief strategy officer at McCann.